Monday, August 15, 2016

Donald Trump lashed out at the media on Sunday after more stories describing dysfunction inside his presidential campaign. “If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn’t put false meaning into the words I say, I would be beating Hillary by 20%,” Mr. Trump averred on Twitter.TWTR7.42%

Mr. Trump is right that most of the media want him to lose, but then that was also true of George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. It’s true of every Republican presidential nominee. The difference is that Mr. Trump has made it so easy for the media and his opponents.

The latest stories comport with what we also hear from sources close to the Trump campaign. Mr. Trump’s advisers and his family want the candidate to deliver a consistent message making the case for change. They’d like him to be disciplined. They want him to focus on growing the economy and raising incomes and fighting terrorism.

They think he should make the election a referendum on Hillary Clinton, not on himself. And they’d like him to spend a little time each day—a half hour even—studying the issues he’ll need to understand if he becomes President.

Is that so hard? Apparently so. Mr. Trump prefers to watch the cable shows rather than read a briefing paper. He thinks the same shoot-from-the-lip style that won over a plurality of GOP primary voters can persuade other Republicans and independents who worry if he has the temperament to be Commander in Chief.

He also thinks the crowds at his campaign rallies are a substitute for the lack of a field organization and digital turnout strategy. And he thinks that Twitter and social media can make up for being outspent $100 million to zero in battleground states.

By now it should be obvious that none of this is working. It’s obvious to many of his advisers, who are the sources for the news stories about dysfunction. They may be covering for themselves, but this is what happens in failing campaigns. The difference is that the recriminations typically start in October, not mid-August.

These stories are appearing now because the polls show that Mr. Trump is on the path to losing a winnable race. He is now losing in every key battleground state, some like New Hampshire by double digits. The Midwest industrial states he claimed he would put into play—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania—have turned sharply toward Mrs. Clinton.

More ominously, states won by John McCain and Mitt Romney are much closer than they should be. If Mr. Trump is fighting to hold Georgia, Arizona and even Utah by September, a landslide defeat becomes all too possible.

The tragedy is that this is happening in a year when Republicans should win. The political scientist Alan Abramowitz has spent years developing his “time for a change” forecasting model. The model looks at the rate of GDP growth in the second quarter of an election year (1.2% this year), the incumbent President’s approval rating, and the electorate’s desire for change after one party has held the White House for eight years.

No model is perfect, but Mr. Abramowitz’s has predicted the winner of the major-party popular vote in every presidential election since 1988. His model predicts that Mr. Trump should win a narrow victory with 51.4%. A mainstream GOP candidate who runs a reasonably competent campaign would have about a 66% chance of victory.

Mr. Trump has alienated his party and he isn’t running a competent campaign. Mrs. Clinton is the second most unpopular presidential nominee in history—after Mr. Trump. But rather than reassure voters and try to repair his image, the New Yorker has spent the last three weeks giving his critics more ammunition.

Even with more than 80 days left, Mr. Trump’s window for a turnaround is closing. The “Trump pivot” always seemed implausible given his lifelong instincts and habits, but Mr. Trump promised Republicans. “At some point I’ll be so presidential that you people will be so bored, and I’ll come back as a presidential person, and instead of 10,000 people I’ll have about 150 people and they’ll say, boy, he really looks presidential,” he said in April.

Those who sold Mr. Trump to GOP voters as the man who could defeat Hillary Clinton now face a moment of truth. Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Paul Manafort and the talk-radio right told Republicans their man could rise to the occasion.

If they can’t get Mr. Trump to change his act by Labor Day, the GOP will have no choice but to write off the nominee as hopeless and focus on salvaging the Senate and House and other down-ballot races. As for Mr. Trump, he needs to stop blaming everyone else and decide if he wants to behave like someone who wants to be President—or turn the nomination over to Mike Pence.

Violence erupts in Milwaukee on Saturday night after a uniformed officer shot and killed a 23-year-old man during a foot pursuit which took place after an afternoon traffic stop. A crowd later broke the windows of an unoccupied squad car and set another one on fire before setting a gas station on fire

Fidel Castro made a rare public appearance on Saturday at his 90th birthday gala, after the leader of the 1959 revolution thanked fellow Cubans for their well wishes and lambasted his old foe the United States in a column carried by state-run media. Cuba went into overdrive this month honoring the retired "El Comandante," who built a Communist-run state on the doorstep of the United States, surviving what it says were hundreds of assassination attempts along the...

Swiss police say a 34-year-old woman has died from wounds suffered after a man attacked her and others with a knife and a burning liquid aboard a train. St. Gallen canton (state) police said the woman died Sunday morning of wounds suffered in the Saturday afternoon attack on a Swiss train. Four others - including the suspect - remain in critical condition; a total of seven were wounded. Police spokesman Hans-Peter Kruesi told The Associated Press authorities have...

What is President Vladimir Putin planning for Ukraine? Kyiv officials argue Russia’s leader is accumulating pretexts to justify a major assault with the aim of securing a land route through Ukraine’s southeast regions to Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Moscow annexed weeks after the 2014 ouster of Putin’s ally Viktor Yanukovych. They see the escalation of fighting in the country’s mainly Russian-speaking eastern region of Donbas, where for more than two years pro-Moscow militants and...

A Russian lawmaker's son who U.S. prosecutors say orchestrated a hacking scheme that resulted in about $170 million in fraudulent credit-card purchases goes on trial this week in the state of Washington.

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MILWAUKEE (AP) -- The man whose fatal shooting by Milwaukee police triggered hours of violent protests on the city&apos;s predominantly black north side was a 23-year-old black man and father to a toddler, his mother and police said Sunday....

“Paul Manafort is among those names on the list of so-called ‘black accounts of the Party of Regions,’ which the detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine are investigating,” the statement said. “We emphasize that the presence of P. Manafort’s name in the list does not mean that he actually got the money, because the signatures that appear in the column of recipients could belong to other people.”

The accounting records surfaced this year, when Serhiy A. Leshchenko, a member of Parliament who said he had received a partial copy from a source he did not identify, published line items covering six months of outlays in 2012 totaling $66 million. In an interview, Mr. Leshchenko said another source had provided the entire multiyear ledger to Viktor M. Trepak, a former deputy director of the domestic intelligence agency of Ukraine, the S.B.U., who passed it to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.

The bureau, whose government funding is mandated under American and European Union aid programs and which has an evidence-sharing agreement with the F.B.I., has investigatory powers but cannot indict suspects. Only if it passes its findings to prosecutors — which has not happened with Mr. Manafort — does a subject of its inquiry become part of a criminal case.

Individual disbursements reflected in the ledgers ranged from a few hundred dollars to millions of dollars. Of the records released from 2012, one shows a payment of $67,000 for a watch and another of $8.4 million to the owner of an advertising agency for campaign work for the party before elections that year.

“It’s a very vivid example of how political parties are financed in Ukraine,” said Daria N. Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kiev. “It represents the very dirty cash economy in Ukraine.”

Offshore Companies

While working in Ukraine, Mr. Manafort had also positioned himself to profit from business deals that benefited from connections he had gained through his political consulting. One of them, according to court filings, involved a network of offshore companies that government investigators and independent journalists in Ukraine have said was used to launder public money and assets purportedly stolen by cronies of the government.

The network comprised shell companies whose ultimate owners were shielded by the secrecy laws of the offshore jurisdictions where they were registered, including the British Virgin Islands, Belize and the Seychelles.

In a recent interview, Serhiy V. Gorbatyuk, Ukraine’s special prosecutor for high-level corruption cases, pointed to an open file on his desk containing paperwork for one of the shell companies, Milltown Corporate Services Ltd., which played a central role in the state’s purchase of two oil derricks for $785 million, or about double what they were said to be worth.

“This,” he said, “was an offshore used often by Mr. Yanukovych’s entourage.”

The role of the offshore companies in business dealings involving Mr. Manafort came to light because of court filings in the Cayman Islands and in a federal court in Virginia related to an investment fund, Pericles Emerging Markets. Mr. Manafort and several partners started the fund in 2007, and its major backer was Mr. Deripaska, the Russian mogul, to whom the State Department has refused to issue a visa, apparently because of allegations linking him to Russian organized crime, a charge he has denied.

Mr. Deripaska agreed to commit as much as $100 million to Pericles so it could buy assets in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, including a regional cable television and communications company called Black Sea Cable. But corporate records and court filings show that it was hardly a straightforward transaction.

The Black Sea Cable assets were controlled by a rotating cast of offshore companies that led back to the Yanukovych network, including, at various times, Milltown Corporate Services and two other companies well known to law enforcement officials, Monohold A.G. and Intrahold A.G. Those two companies won inflated contracts with a state-run agricultural company, and also acquired a business center in Kiev with a helicopter pad on the roof that would ease Mr. Yanukovych’s commute from his country estate to the presidential offices.

A Disputed Investment

Mr. Deripaska would later say he invested $18.9 million in Pericles in 2008 to complete the acquisition of Black Sea Cable. But the planned purchase — including the question of who ended up with the Black Sea assets — has since become the subject of a dispute between Mr. Deripaska and Mr. Manafort.

In 2014, Mr. Deripaska filed a legal action in a Cayman Islands court seeking to recover his investment in Pericles, which is now defunct. He also said he had paid about $7.3 million in management fees to the fund over two years. Mr. Deripaska did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Manafort’s lawyer, Mr. Hibey, disputed the account of the Black Sea Cable deal contained in Mr. Deripaska’s Cayman filings, and said the Russian oligarch had overseen details of the final transaction involving the acquisition. He denied that Mr. Manafort had received management fees from Pericles during its operation, but said that one of Mr. Manafort’s partners, Rick Gates, who is also working on the Trump campaign, had received a “nominal” sum.

Mr. Manafort continued working in Ukraine after the demise of Mr. Yanukovych’s government, helping allies of the ousted president and others form a political bloc that opposed the new pro-Western administration. Some of his aides were in Ukraine as recently as this year, and Ukrainian company records give no indication that Mr. Manafort has formally dissolved the local branch of his company,Davis Manafort International, directed by a longtime assistant, Konstantin V. Kilimnik.

At Mr. Manafort’s old office on Sofiivska Street, new tenants said they had discovered several curiosities apparently left behind, including a knee X-ray signed by Mr. Yanukovych, possibly referring to tennis matches played between Mr. Manafort and Mr. Yanukovych, who had spoken publicly of a knee ailment affecting his game.

There was another item with Mr. Yanukovych’s autograph: a piece of white paper bearing a rough sketch of Independence Square, the site of the 2014 uprising that drove him from power.

The jihadi group Jabhat al-Nusra announced on July 28 that it had severed all ties to al Qaeda and established a new movement in Syria: Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, or “the Front for the Conquest of the Levant.” The unprecedented move was formally sanctioned by al Qaeda’s senior leadership and comes as the group has also revealed its leader’s identity for the first time.

In a video statement televised simultaneously on pro-opposition Orient News and on Al Jazeera, Jabhat al-Nusra leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani — whose real name was separately revealed to beAhmed Hussein al-Shara — presented the split as one driven by a desire “to form a unified body” of Islamist forces and to bring together the disparate factions of Syria’s revolution to best ensure the credible defense of Islam from attack. Continuing a long-held theme, Jolani introduced Jabhat Fateh al-Sham as a movement that would exist to “protect” and to “serve,” rather than to rule or oppress. He also said that the international community’s increasing attention to the group, due to its al Qaeda links, was a reason for “the complete cancellation of all operations under the name of Jabhat al-Nusra.”

Nobody should be confused by this maneuver: Jabhat al-Nusra, which is also known as the Nusra Front, remains as potentially dangerous, and as radical, as ever. In severing its ties to al Qaeda, the organization is more clearly than ever demonstrating its long-game approach to Syria, in which it seeks to embed within revolutionary dynamics and encourage Islamist unity to outsmart its enemies, both near and far. In this sense, the Nusra Front (and now Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) differ markedly from the Islamic State, which has consistently acted alone and in outright competition with other Islamist armed factions. Instead of unity, the Islamic State explicitly seeks division.

Ultimately, while this may be a change in name and formal affiliation, Jolani’s group will remain largely the same. Therefore, this is by no means a loss to al Qaeda. In fact, it is merely the latest reflection of a new and far more potentially effective method of jihad focused on collective, gradualist, and flexible action. Its goal is to achieve recurring tactical gains that one day will amount to a substantial strategic victory: the establishment of an Islamic emirate with sufficient popular acceptance or support.

Al Qaeda’s central leadership has played a significant role in determining the trajectory of this move

Al Qaeda’s central leadership has played a significant role in determining the trajectory of this move, which was underlined in the sequencing of the announcement. Six hours before Abu Mohammed al-Jolani appeared on television, Nusra Front media wing al-Manara al-Bayda (the White Minaret) published an audio statement in which al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and his deputy, Ahmed Hassan (Abu al-Khayr), gave their public blessings for the severance of ties. “The bonds of Islamic brotherhood are stronger than any obsolete links between organizations,” Zawahiri said. “These organizational links must be sacrificed without hesitation if they threaten your unity.”

That Abu al-Khayr also spoke was especially interesting, given the likelihood that he has been based inside Syria since at least late 2015, as I revealed earlier this year.

The Nusra Front also published the first confirmed photo and then video footage showing Jolani, who had previously insisted on concealing his face. Intriguingly, despite dissolving his ties to al Qaeda, Jolani appeared dressed in green military fatigues and a white headdress in what appeared to be a clear attempt to replicate well-known images of Osama bin Laden. In the video address, Jolani was also flanked by two key al Qaeda-linked figures, including Ahmed Salameh Mabrouk (Abu Faraj al-Masri), a veteran jihadi figure with experience fighting in Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan, Russia, and Azerbaijan. Having been Zawahiri’s closest aide through the 1990s, Mabrouk’s laptop was famously captured by the CIA in Baku, Azerbaijan, and described as the “Rosetta Stone of al Qaeda.”

Simply put, al Qaeda is coordinating its Syrian affiliate’s dissolution of ties to its own core leadership for the sake of preserving the long-term viability of the Nusra Front and its jihadi strategic objectives. The ideological ties between al Qaeda and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham remain strong.

This latest development comes at a particularly sensitive time, as the United States and Russia look determined to launch some level of military operations against the Nusra Front in Syria. Despite repeated overt and covert attempts to encourage Syrian opposition groups to “decouple” themselves from areas in Syria where Nusra Front is present, mainstream U.S.-vetted rebel groups have not changed their areas of deployment. For many Syrians, withdrawing from these front lines is seen as tantamount to betraying five years of blood lost to secure any military gains. For some, it would also mean betraying an armed group, the Nusra Front, which has consistently and effectively fought alongside them since 2012.

By dissolving its ties with al Qaeda, Nusra Front has made certain that it will remain deeply embedded within opposition front lines, particularly in the northern governorates of Aleppo and Idlib. Any airstrikes by foreign states targeting the group will almost certainly result in the deaths of mainstream opposition fighters and be perceived on the ground as counterrevolutionary. Consequently, a mission defined by Moscow and Washington in counterterrorism terms would in all likelihood steadily broaden the spectrum of those potentially defined as “terrorists” — to the substantial detriment of any future solution to the Syrian crisis.

The revolution’s reaction

Syrians within the armed opposition have been calling for the Nusra Front to separate itself from al Qaeda since Abu Mohammed al-Jolani’s public pledge of bayah (allegiance) to al Qaeda in April 2013. Jabhat al-Nusra’s increasing conservatism since mid-2014 and its periodically aggressive actions against U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions have intensified such calls for Nusra Front to clarify its allegiances: to Syria, or to al Qaeda?

In the past, these concerns have likely hampered the Nusra Front’s capacity to recruit at its fullest potential rate. Moreover, several influential Islamist commanders active in Latakia, Idlib, and Aleppo have repeatedly told me that they have been working quietly to discourage young Syrian men from joining al Qaeda in Syria.

Armed and civilian Syrians within the opposition community similarly believe that by peeling the Nusra Front away from al Qaeda, the task of ultimately separating their “sons” and “brothers” from the jihadi movement would be made easier. By splitting the group from the al Qaeda leadership, they hope that its internal structures would lose some of their resiliency, and joining more mainstream opposition groups could become a more attractive prospect. Should Syria suddenly experience a period of relative calm, then this goal may not be as unrealistic as it unfortunately is today.

Although many Syrians still remain justifiably concerned about Jabhat Fateh al-Sham’s extremist foundations, the fact that the group has now made what many will perceive as a major concession puts it in an extremely advantageous position. Whether they say so publicly or not, a significant portion of Syria’s mainstream opposition will see this as a positive step and move to embrace Jolani’s call for unity. Therefore, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham will now seek to intensify its long-standing call for large-scale mergers and military coalitions in key areas of the country.

The most significant potential consequence of this latest development would be a merger of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham with the Syrian Salafist group Ahrar al-Sham. However, such an undertaking appears still to be some way off, as it continues to face significant structural and organizational obstacles. What is more likely in the immediate term is an increase in region-specific coalitions, in which multiple armed groups seek to integrate their military commands in order to present more effective challenges to their adversaries on the battlefield. Existing rebel coalitions in Idlib and Aleppo — particularly Jaish al-Fateh — will in all likelihood form the basis for such military unity initiatives.

By paving the way towards such a dynamic,

Jolani has laid down a gauntlet to Syria’s opposition

Jolani has laid down a gauntlet to Syria’s opposition. The most moderate FSA groups will be forced to choose between military and revolutionary unity, or operational isolation and subjugation. In short, Jabhat al-Nusra is taking yet another step toward shaping the orientation of the Syrian opposition in its favor.

Al Qaeda’s plan

Jabhat al-Nusra and al Qaeda may have publicly split, but the organizational and ideological ties that bind them will prove harder to erase. Al Qaeda has been deploying senior veteran figures to Syria from across the Islamic world since 2013 in order to bolster the jihadi credibility of the Nusra Front, and to take advantage of Syria’s chaos to establish a safe haven capable of long-term transnational jihadi operations. These individuals will remain in place to seek the very same objectives as they did when they first arrived — and just like Nusra Front’s senior leadership, none of them will suddenly forget their global jihadi roots. After all, al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri himself stated in March 2016 that one’s relationship to the international jihad (read: al Qaeda) should not be seen as an obstacle to attaining “the great hopes of the Islamic nation.”

A central facet of al Qaeda’s operating strategy in Syria has been the creation of a localized jihad, which has evolved from an elite-driven project to a popular Islamist revivalist trend led by the masses. By and large, Nusra Front’s modus operandi until late 2015 focused upon establishing and then consolidating this first “elite” stage of the Syrian jihad, in which they and a select number of smaller jihadi units tacitly loyal to al Qaeda took the lead in promoting the jihadi cause in Syria. From the end of 2015, however, an internal assessment was made that a sufficient base of opposition society had been socialized into supporting the group’s rising stature. Jolani had pointed to this socialization strategy as early as December 2013, when he claimed that “Syrian society has indeed changed much; it is not the same pre-revolution society. There will be a historical mark of pre- and post-jihad in al-Sham.”

Since late 2015, the Nusra Front was transitioning from an elite-driven jihad into its second phase, which encouraged the development of a mass movement calling for Islamic rule in Syria. As the Syrian opposition’s perceptions of international abandonment have solidified, the Nusra Front’s message of “unity” has had more of a welcoming audience, though its al Qaeda connections have been the primary obstacle to its realization.

While it focused on spoiling international efforts to launch a political process and to sustain a cessation of hostilities inside Syria, the Nusra Front secretly proposed a grand merger with opposition groups in January 2016 in exchange for its potential breaking of ties to al Qaeda. Those discussions have continued ever since, frequently attracting prominent jihadi figures linked to al Qaeda to travel into northern Syria to mediate, one of whom was killed in a U.S. drone strike in April 2016. Things came to a head in early July, when a number of senior Nusra Front figures looked set to splinter off and establish a new faction called al-Harakat al-Islamiya al-Souriya, or “the Syrian Islamic Movement.”

Jolani perceived this as an ultimatum to his authority, so he swiftly called Nusra Front’s Shura Council together in an ultimately successful attempt to keep his movement together, which I first revealed on July 23.

The Nusra Front’s goal is simple: It seeks to build an expanding blanket of legitimacy in Syria

The Nusra Front’s goal is simple: It seeks to build an expanding blanket of legitimacy in Syria, which one day in the future will be of imperative importance in justifying the establishment of an Islamic emirate. The group has consistently demonstrated an impressive ability to act in accordance with the sensitivities of Syrians living within its midst. Rarely has it stepped too far out of line, such as to spark a challenge to its authority that it could not manage. Although it did float the idea of an emirate earlier this year, it proved deeply unpopular for a variety of reasons — one being the group’s al Qaeda affiliation.

Problems for Washington

As Jabhat al-Nusra’s long game plays out in Syria, it poses a significant challenge to the international community. Although a great many differences remain between the United States and Russia, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which some level of airstrikes are not launched against Jabhat Fateh al-Sham — or whatever the group wants to call itself. There seems little space for turning back, and policymakers will rightly not see the Nusra Front’s disaffiliation from al Qaeda as making it a more moderate organization.

Perhaps more significantly, this latest development has also made it entirely feasible that regional states, notably Qatar and Turkey, could now attempt to provide direct material support to the group. Turkey in particular is likely to use the argument that, having announced a severing of its ties to al Qaeda, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham is as legitimate a partner as Washington’s preferred anti-Islamic State ally, the Kurdish YPG.

Placed in this quandary, international military action against Jabhat al-Nusra does seem all but inevitable. At the same time, however, the consequences for doing so have become even more concerning. Ultimately, what remains of the mainstream opposition risks being dragged into an international escalation that appears fueled by a desire to combat al Qaeda with an insufficient appreciation for the complexity of Syria’s broader dynamics.

Charles Lister’s paper, “Profiling Jabhat al-Nusra,” was published on July 27 and is available here.

Combined with last month's mass shake-up of regional and federal elites -- which saw four regional governors, four federal district chiefs, and a disgraced customs boss replaced -- it illustrates that these are far from normal times for Russia's ruling elite.

Governors and prominent law-enforcement officials are being arrested. Former Putin cronies who were once untouchable are being thrown under the bus. Suddenly, nobody feels safe. Suddenly, everybody appears vulnerable.

For Russia's gilded ruling class, the rules are clearly a-changin'.

"Putin, who is known for his loyalty to longtime associates, has left some of his friends vulnerable to attack. This is a new stage of Putin's rule," political commentator Leonid Bershidsky wrote in Bloomberg.

For most of Putin's long rule, he was essentially the front man for an oligarchic elite -- the so-called "collective Putin" -- that effectively ruled Russia.

Like the Soviet general secretaries, Putin was first among equals, to be sure. He was the key figure and the decider. But he had to find consensus and balance among the Kremlin's competing clans and among the dozen or so figures in his "politburo."

But we don't hear much about the "collective Putin" or "Putin's Politburo" anymore.

And that is because, in recent years, the Kremlin leader has moved away from a collective leadership model to one centered on the leader himself.

"If until recently, the system acted in the interests of the bureaucracy, now, it does so ever more in the interests of the leader," Moscow-based political analyst Nikolai Petrov wrote in Vedomosti.

According to Petrov, Putin is effectively abandoning an elite personnel policy resembling Leonid Brezhnev's "stability of cadres" approach and toward one reminiscent of Josef Stalin's -- minus, of course, the mass executions of ousted officials.

The Class Of 2014

An early clue that changes were afoot in Putin's governing model came back in 2014, at the height of the nationalistic fervor accompanying the conflict in Ukraine.

Reports surfaced that Putin had been quietly bringing a new cadre of officials to Moscow -- recruited by the security services and vetted for loyalty to Putin -- reshaping the rank-and-file bureaucracy in his own image.

Historian and political analyst Vladimir Pastukhov wrote in Polit.ru at the time that the fledgling new nomenklatura were between 25 and 35 years old, hailed mostly from the regions, and came from relatively poor backgrounds.

They were selected based on their loyalty to the regime and for being "psychologically closer to Putin" than their predecessors. And they were "people without deep roots" who were "ready for anything" that facilitated their advancement.

"So far, their political consciousness is a tabula rasa on which you can draw anything," Pastukhov wrote. "In these brains, you can download any ideological software. The main thing is that it does not interfere with a successful career."

Putin's new "Class of 2014" filling the lower and middle ranks of the bureaucracy was a generational shift that drew obvious comparisons to Stalin's "Class of 1938" -- the cohort of officials who were brought to Moscow from the provinces in the wake of the purges and ruled the Soviet Union from the death of Stalin to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Fall Of The Untouchables

If the mass recruitment of a new generation of midlevel functionaries shook up the rank and file, an earthquake hit the ruling elite's upper echelon a year ago when Putin sacked his longtime crony Vladimir Yakunin as head of Russian Railways.

When somebody as powerful, influential, and close to the Kremlin leader as Yakunin was kicked off the island, it was a surefire sign that all was not well with Team Putin.

It showed that Putin's loyalty to longtime associates only went so far. And it showed that Putin's longtime pact with the ruling class -- loyalty in exchange for a license to use the state budget as their personal ATM machine -- was changing.

"Putin may be realizing that tough economic times require better managers than his buddies, and that to remain in power he needs to distance himself from the oligarchy he has created," Bershidsky wrote in Bloomberg at the time.

Yakunin's fall -- which came almost exactly one year before Ivanov was dismissed -- was indeed a harbinger.

In the past year, three regional governors have been arrested on corruption charges and last month the FSB raided the Moscow branch of the Investigative Committee, arresting three top officials on charges of taking bribes from a notorious organized crime kingpin.

And then another Putin crony took a fall when Andrei Belyaninov, the head of the Federal Customs Service who, like Ivanov, served with Putin in the KGB, was accused of corruption.

He was also humiliated when a televised raid on his home showed priceless antiques and bundles of cash in shoe boxes.

And then came the days of the long knives: the mass reshuffling last month and the subsequent removal of Ivanov.

And according to reports in the Russian media, another purge is likely in the autumn following the State Duma elections in September.

One thing, however, is not changing: Putin's reliance on trusted veterans of the security services -- and, increasingly, veterans of his personal security detail.

So why did Putin change his governing model?

Partially because his priorities changed with the conflict in Ukraine, the showdown with the West, and the rise of a nationalistic ideology in the Kremlin. And partially because there is a lot less money around to feed a kleptocratic elite that had grown accustomed to seeking rents with impunity.

"The annexation of Crimea has ensured Putin's place in history and gave rise to new geopolitical thinking and thus a new pyramid of priorities," political commentator Tatyana Stanovaya wrote in a commentary for the Moscow Carnegie Center.

"As a result, the priorities of many of the president's allies have become severely misaligned with his own."

UPDATED: This post, which was written before Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Ivanov was dismissed, has been updated to reflect that development.

WASHINGTON — A Russian cyberattack that targeted Democratic politicians was bigger than it first appeared and breached the private email accounts of more than 100 party officials and groups, officials with knowledge of the case said Wednesday.

The widening scope of the attack has prompted the F.B.I. to broaden its investigation, and agents have begun notifying a long list of Democratic officials that the Russians may have breached their personal accounts.

The main targets appear to have been the personal email accounts of Hillary Clinton’s campaign officials and party operatives, along with a number of party organizations.

Officials have acknowledged that the Russian hackers gained access to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is the fund-raising arm for House Democrats, and to theDemocratic National Committee, including a D.N.C. voter analytics program used by Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.

But the hack now appears to have extended well beyond those groups, and organizations like the Democratic Governors’ Association may also have been affected, according to Democrats involved in the investigation. However, in a statement Thursday, the governors association said it “was informed that our analytics data was not compromised as part of the D.N.C. breach that affected the Clinton campaign.”

The group added that “we have no reason to believe that any D.G.A. emails were compromised by the D.N.C. breach.”

Democrats say they are bracing for the possibility that another batch of damaging or embarrassing internal material could become public before the November presidential election.

The attack has already proved politically damaging. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last month, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as D.N.C. chairwoman after WikiLeaks released a trove of hacked internal emails showing party officials eager for Mrs. Clinton to win the nomination over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

American intelligence agencies have said they have “high confidence” that the attack was the work of Russian intelligence agencies. It has injected a heavy dose of international intrigue into an already chaotic presidential campaign as Democrats have alleged that the Russians are trying to help tilt the election toward the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Trump stunned Democrats and Republicans when he said last month that he hoped Russian intelligence services had successfully hacked Mrs. Clinton’s email, and encouraged them to publish whatever they may have stolen, although he said later that he was being sarcastic.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials, however, are taking the issue seriously.

F.B.I. officials briefed staff members of House and Senate Intelligence Committees last week on the investigation into the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee. Briefings for other congressional committees are expected in the coming days.

Much of the briefing to the committee staff focused on the fact that American intelligence agencies have virtually no doubt that the Russian government was behind the theft, according to one staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss elements of the confidential briefing.

The extension of the hack’s scope beyond the D.N.C. and the House Democratic committee added a troubling new element to the case, the staff member said.

American authorities remain uncertain whether the electronic break-in to the committee’s computer systems was intended as fairly routine cyberespionage or as part of an effort to manipulate the presidential election.

Russian motives are still an open question, said a federal law enforcement official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

There is no evidence so far that the theft penetrated the emails of lawmakers or staff members who serve on the Intelligence Committees, two staff members said.

The F.B.I. says it has no direct evidence that Mrs. Clinton’s private email server was hacked by the Russians or anyone else. But in June, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said that intruders had tried, and that any successful intruders were probably far too skilled to leave evidence of their intrusion behind. Law enforcement officials said he had the Russians in mind.

Mrs. Clinton’s aides were concerned about the possibility of an outside breach after a hacker calling himself “Guccifer” got into the email account in 2013 of Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidante of Mrs. Clinton’s who often emailed her on her private server, according to new documents released Wednesday.

Cheryl D. Mills, a lawyer and adviser for Mrs. Clinton, said she discussed the 2013 hack with the technician who ran Mrs. Clinton’s private server and considered “whether this event might affect Secretary Clinton’s email,” according to a written account Ms. Mills provided to Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that is suing the State Department.

So far, it does not appear that the Russian hackers sought or gained access to any computer systems used by Mr. Trump, who is known to avoid email, officials said.

Since news of the D.N.C. hack broke in June, a number of Democratic organizations have been scrubbing their files to determine what internal information might have been compromised. They have also been shoring up their cybersecurity defenses to guard against another attack.

An official with the D.N.C., speaking on condition of anonymity, said the committee took the threat very seriously, but would not comment on specific security steps taken.

WikiLeaks, the group that put out the D.N.C. emails publicly last month, interjected itself into the hacking case again this week when it offered a $20,000 reward for information on the shooting deathlast month of a former D.N.C. staff member, Seth Rich, outside his Washington home. His killing fueled speculation on the internet that he was somehow tied to the hacked emails, but the police have not given any credence to that speculation.

The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has made it clear that he would like to hurt Mrs. Clinton’s bid for the White House, opposing her candidacy on policy and personal grounds. He has hinted that he has more material about the presidential campaign that he could release.

The Democratic Party is once again the subject of a Wikileaks dump, as information stolen from the party's servers in June continues to be made public.

The newest set of documents came from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the fundraising organization for the House Democrats, and included cell phone numbers and email addresses of nearly 200 lawmakers. The hacker claiming responsibility for both this leak and the leak prior to the Democratic National Convention, Guccifer 2.0, has been linked to Russian intelligence.

The main concern this time around is whether the hack represented a routine cybersecurity attack or a more pointed attempt to influence the presidential election on the part of the Russian intelligence. The F.B.I is leading the investigation of the attack on the Democratic Party's servers that occurred in June, but at this point, officials are fairly certain that Russian intelligence is behind the attack.

Dmitri Alperovitch, the chief technology officer of the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, told the Monitor he determined that the attackers “were operating from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm Moscow time, which gave us an indication we’re dealing with government workers rather than cybercriminals burning the midnight oil for profit.”

While Guccifer 2.0 hinted that there may be more emails and files leaked in the future, the fallout of this second round of emails will likely prove less embarrassing than the first, which showed the Democratic National Committee’s bias against Bernie Sanders during the primary elections and prompted the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Additionally, investigators found similarities between this attack and previous hacks by Russian intelligence, as well as malicious code that was built on Russian servers.

Still, confusion remains – and in the world of Russian cybersecurity, confusion is a tactic.

"This is what cyberconflict actually looks like," James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, told the Monitor. “The problem in the US is we’re very militarized, so we tend to think about attacking infrastructure. The Russian approach is much more political and about trying to manipulate public opinion."

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has repeatedly claimed that the Russian hacks are a plan to interfere with the presidential election to ensure that Donald Trump, who has said positive things about Russian president Vladimir Putin in the past, wins the election. After all, the first email dump did not reflect well on Clinton.

The most solid connection between Trump and Putin is that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has ties to the former prime minister of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia after the Ukrainian revolution in 2014.

While some are worried about what the hack and its potential connections to Russia could mean for the election, Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House subcommittee on the National Security Agency and cybersecurity, said that the phone numbers and emails addresses being made public were not, in and of themselves, a cause for concern.

“If there were the ability for someone to hack into those accounts, that really gets worrisome,” he told the New York Times. “Someone could cause a lot of damage if they were able to send emails out from a member’s account, but I’m not hearing that that’s a risk at this point.”

“It’s hard for me to imagine how just having a bunch of numbers, cell phones, and emails would in any way affect the election,” Mr. Himes added. “It wasn’t totally unexpected.”

One overarching concern is that if this is cyber warfare through public manipulation, it is something the United States has little experience dealing with.

“If this indeed turns out to be a cyberattack and leak conducted by a foreign actor to influence our elections, that would be a grave matter that should come with serious consequences,” Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement.

“That foreign actors may be trying to influence our election – let alone a powerful adversary – should concern all Americans of any party.”

Russia appears to be preparing for a new military offensive in Ukraine, according to Institute for the Study of War, which notes that since August 5 there has been an ongoing Russian military build-up on the northern, eastern, and southern Ukrainian border, allowing it “to threaten or conduct military operations into Ukraine from multiple directions, increasing Ukraine’s vulnerability to Russian or Russia-backed separatistforces.”

The looming possible escalation follows claims by Russia’s FSB state security service earlier this week that it prevented two attempts by Ukrainian special forces to launch attacks in Russian-held Crimea. Foreign Policyreports that Ukrainian officials denied Russia’s claims, with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko declaring that Russia’s accusations were “insane.” For his part, Russian president Vladimir Putin has responded to the alleged threats by vowing to take “further security measures” in Crimea, though a spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign ministry suggested that Putin really just “wants more war.” On Friday, Vice President Joe Biden urged Poroshenko to avoid escalating the conflict as much aspossible.

That might prove impossible, however. As CNNpointed out on Thursday, Ukraine’s military forces are now at high alert as they scramble in anticipation of a Russian attack, and overall tensions are the highest they have been since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, which led to the now two-year-old war in eastern Ukraine. The ISW adds that Ukraine’s military mobilization on its borders with Russia and Crimea “will tax [the country’s] finances and military capabilities and may also further weaken Ukraine’s fragile politicalsituation.”

Foreign Policy’s Reid Standish adds some more context regarding what has become an increasingly bloody summer because of theconflict:

The renewed hostilities in Crimea come as violence has surged during the summer months in eastern Ukraine despite a nominal ceasefire. More than 9,000 have died since the war began in April 2014, with more than 600 Ukrainian soldiers killed in fighting so far this year. According to recently released figures by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, civilian casualties have spiked to a level not seen since August 2015, prior to the implementation of the most recentceasefire.

In addition to Russia’s military build up, it has been conducting provocative military exercises in the region, with more planned near the Ukrainian border and inside Crimea next week, and the BBCreports that it has now delivered advanced air-defense missile systems to Crimea as well. Those missiles are designed to hit airborne targets as far away as 249 miles, which means they could reach deep into Ukrainian territory. For an idea of the scale, timing, and range of Russia’s renewed offensive capabilities in the region, seebelow:

So assuming that Ukraine is right, and Russia is fabricating reasons to pursue a premeditated escalation of hostilities, why would they do that? According to Reuters, Russia’s claims of Ukrainian incursions into Crimea could just be a way for it to back out of peace talks that had been planned for next month’s G20 summit in China, or as a way to gain more leverage over Ukraine and the West whenever those talks do occur. Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst in Ukraine, told Reuters that he didn’t think Putin would “go all out for a big war,” but Russia’s plan could focus on smaller military operations in order to “scare the West with the prospect of full-scale conflict with Ukraine,” thus pressuring Kiev to accept Russia’s preferred plans to resolve thewar.

The timing of the spat is notable in light of upcoming elections in both America and Russia. American officials say that Barack Obama, America’s outgoing president, has made it clear that he wants progress on Ukraine before the end of his term. Victoria Nuland, the American State Department official responsible for Ukraine, has been in talks with Vladislav Surkov, a close confidant of Mr Putin. By rejecting the Normandy Four format, Mr Putin may be hoping to pressure Mr Obama into making the grand Yalta-style bargain he has long desired.A re-run of the Ukrainian drama may also play well domestically ahead of Russia’s parliamentary elections on September 18th. As the country’s economic crisis grinds on, the looming vote has the Kremlin anxious. Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s prime minister, drew widespread criticism in May when he told a griping Crimean pensioner that “There’s no money, but hang in there—all the best to you!” While the war in Ukraine has largely disappeared from state media in recent months, its return to the headlines could provide a welcome distraction.

Speaking of influence on an election, any renewed or expanded conflict in Ukraine could also have implications for the U.S. presidential race, since Republican nominee Donald Trump is largely seen as sympathetic to — and sometimes even admiring of — President Putin, and because members of his campaign are directly entangled with elements of the Russian regime. Trump and his campaign have also sought to downplay the threat that Russia poses to Ukraine. They softened the language in the official GOP platform regarding the conflict, and Trump insisted in a recent interview that President Putin “is not going into Ukraine,” in addition to recently saying that he would not defend America’s Baltic NATO allies against Russianinvasion. There is also the added intrigue of the extensive cyberattack on U.S. Democratic party groups which is believed to have been perpetrated by hackers working for Russia, and the possibility that the U.S. will issue new sanctions on the country as aresult.

A Swiss man set a fire and stabbed people on a train in the country’s northeast, wounding six people as well as himself. The 27-year-old suspect had at least one knife and poured out a flammable liquid, which caught fire.

(HAVANA) — Fidel Castro has written a long letter thanking Cubans for their support on his 90th birthday and once again criticizing President Barack Obama.

In the letter in state media Saturday, Castro relays “my deepest gratitude for demonstrations of respect, greetings and praise that I’ve received in recent days, which give me strength to reciprocate with ideas that I will send to party militants and relevant organizations.”

Castro accompanies his thanks with reminiscences about his childhood and youth.

He returns at the end to a critique of Obama, who appeared to anger the revolutionary leader with a March trip to Cuba in which he called for Cubans to look toward the future. Castro also criticizes Obama for not apologizing to Japan during a trip to Hiroshima in May.

say a Swiss man set a fire and stabbed people on a train in the country’s northeast, wounding six people as well as himself.

Police in St. Gallen canton (state) say the incident happened at 2:20 local time (1220 GMT) Saturday afternoon as the train neared the station in Salez, near the border with Liechtenstein.

They say the 27-year-old suspect had at least one knife and poured out a flammable liquid, which caught fire.

Police say the wounded included a 6-year-old child, three women aged 17, 34 and 43, and two men aged 17 and 50. Some of the injuries were said to be serious but there were no further details immediately.

Police were investigating the attacker’s motive. Switzerland’s 20 Minuten newspaper reported on its website that police did not believe the incident was terrorist-related.

In addition to large police presence, the local fire department responded along with three rescue helicopters, two emergency doctors, three ambulances and railroad authorities.

In July, a refugee from Afghanistan attacked four tourists on a German train, then stabbed a woman as he fled from the train. All survived. Police shot and killed the attacker.

Later in the same month, a teenager armed with an axe and knife attacked passengers on another train in Germany, injuring a score of people. He too was shot and killed by police as he tried to escape from the train.

Last September, a heavily armed gunman opened fire on a high-speed Amsterdam-Paris train, but he was overpowered by two young American soldiers and their companion.

Vladimir Putin accuses Ukraine of killing Russian servicemen in terrorist attacks in Crimea and warns that the deaths will not be ignored. The Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, orders his country’s military to be in a state of combat readiness. Talks over the Minsk agreement, which established a ceasefire of sorts in the vicious conflict, have been put on hold. There are dire predictions that Ukraine is sliding back into war.

The upsurge of this particular episode of violence, and its venue, has come as a surprise. There has been low intensity, but rising, strife in separatist Donetsk and Luhansk in the east over the last few months, but Crimea has not experienced serious military action since it was annexed from Ukraine by the Kremlin in the chaotic aftermath of the Maidan protests.

That is not to say that Crimea has been entirely calm. Tartar and Ukrainian activists had claimed systematic persecution by the Russian dominated government in Simferopol. Some of those we met while reporting from there at the time have fled, some are in prison. On the Ukrainian side of the border pipelines carrying electricity into the peninsula have been blown up, creating severe power shortages: groups of Tartars have blocked roads at the de-facto border, stopping supplies from getting in.

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Inside Story – Is the conflict in Ukraine about to escalate?

The reason for the timing of this flashpoint remains unclear. Some of us covering the fighting in eastern Ukraine were surprised that the Russians consented to the first Minsk agreement before taking the city of Mariupol which would have helped open a land corridor from the Donbas to Crimea. The Azov Sea port was vulnerable at the time: most of the Ukrainian forces had withdrawn and its defence was reduced to a few hundred increasingly disillusioned fighters from nationalist militias.

Eastern Ukraine, despite periodic flare ups, has been a frozen conflict since then; a state of affairs which should suit Moscow. No one seriously believes that Crimea, which was part of Soviet Russia until 1954, would ever revert to Ukraine. Kiev, backed by the West, continues to claim suzerainty, but the Ukrainian government also admits that it cannot make that happen by military means.

Russia’s opponents hold that the Kremlin has always wanted to reactivate military action and what better time to do that than when wold attention is distracted by the Rio Olympics? Mr Putin, they repeatedly point out, has form for this; the war between Russia and Georgia took place in 2008 at the time of the Beijing Olympics.

But there is evidence that on that occasion it was Mikheil Saakashvili who had begun hostilities by sending troops into the rebel enclave of South Ossetia, albeit he may have fallen into a well-prepared Russian trap by doing so. The Georgian president had believed that the US would come to his aid if necessary, despite a senior American diplomat warning him this will not happen. In the event we saw the American forces training the Ukrainians head off fast to Tblisi airport along the George W Bush Boulevard when the fighting started.

Moscow has claimed that an officer in its intelligence service, FSB, and a Russian soldier were killed in two separate fire fights at the weekend. It is also claimed that weapons, including explosives for 20 bombs, and grenades, intended for use in an insurgency campaign, have been discovered.

“A terrorist ring” has been broken up, and one of those arrested, say the FSB, is Evgeny Panov, a 39-year-old agent of Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR). The authorities in Kiev confirmed that he was a Ukrainian citizen but refused to make any further comments for “data protection reasons”. President Poroshenko described the charges as “absurd and cynical” and “a pretext for the latest military threats against Ukraine”.

But are the Russians really preparing for military operations against Ukraine from Crimea? Those of us there at the time of the Russian takeover in 2014 were convinced that a plan already in place was in play. A demonstration in the capital, Simferopol, was followed by soldiers in unmarked uniform, the “little green men”, seizing strategic locations; marine infantry from the Russian Black Sea fleet quickly surrounded Ukrainian bases while the government in Kiev dithered.

This time the Ukrainian forces, some trained by the West, are prepared. And, more importantly, it makes little logistical sense for the Russians to carry out an invasion, needing armour, through one bridge and very few crossing points across the isthmus. An amphibious assault would be a massive and risky undertaking. The Donbas remains the logical point of any further intervention, but would the Kremlin even contemplate another military mission with no discernible geo-political advantage while still heavily engaged in Syria?

The Ukrainians themselves are divided over what will happen next. Pointing to Russian military build-up in Crimea Col Andriy Lysenko, spokesman for the presidential administration, maintained that a new offensive could take place next. But Anton Gerashchenko, an MP and advisor to interior minister Arsen Avakov, who is notably hawkish towards Moscow, declared “ I can say openly that we do not anticipate war by the Russian Federation on Ukraine in the near future… Putin’s strategy relies on bargaining with Ukraine over the return of Donbas provided that we abandon all attempts to ever regain Crimea.”

Even Ukrainian military intelligence, accused by Moscow of plotting terrorism in Crimea, seems to be relatively relaxed. Vadim Skibitsky, its spokesman, said the Russian movements were in preparation for an annual exercise, Kavkaz-2016 (although he also pointed out that a Russian exercise was held just before the Georgia war) and added that fresh Russian troops in the Dzhankoy area are part of a regular six monthly rotation.

The EU and US have extended sanctions against Russia over Crimea and the Donbas, but some of European states want to see them relaxed in the future. But the Ukrainian government has also been accused of failing to fulfil some of its obligations under the Minsk agreement, such as holding local elections in the areas it holds in the Donbas. Furthermore, there continues to be irritation in the West over the failure of the Poroshenko government to combat widespread corruption.

What is happening in Crimea now, as some officials in Kiev realise, is much more likely to be manoeuvres to position the Kremlin in a stronger position in a coming diplomatic campaign of attrition. It is not to pave the way for Ukraine to plunge back into war.

The news keeps getting worse. Alarming evidence of how deep the Kremlin’s got its tentacles in Washington mounts by the day. Large-scale hacking by Russian cyber-warriors didn’t just hit the Democratic National Committee, it stole emails from a wide array of top power-players, including the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, NATO’s military boss.

Systematic Russian cyber-attacks on the DNC and related political targets in Washington were detected over a year ago by the National Security Agency, which monitors foreign cyber shenanigans, but the highly classified nature of this intelligence made it difficult to alert Congress about Kremlin espionage.

That the Russians stood behind this operation, using well-known hacking cut-outs, was established early by NSA. “It was the Kremlin, we had them cold,” explained an NSA official with direct knowledge of the case: “Moscow didn’t care we knew, they were unusually brazen.”

Although Democrats were the main focus of this espionage effort, prominent Republicans got hit too. Sen. John McCain was a target of the Russians, which is no surprise given his reputation as a hardliner on Kremlin matters. When President George W. Bush stated that he looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and “found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy…I was able to get a sense of his soul,” McCain famously retorted, “I looked in Putin’s eyes and I saw three letters—a K, a G, and a B.”

Under President Putin, Moscow again refers to United States as their Main Adversary, just as the KGB did during the last Cold War, and there can’t be many American politicians that Putin and his Kremlin loathe more than straight-talking John McCain.

To be clear, there’s nothing strange about a country spying on its adversaries. Everybody spies, and here the Russians are merely doing what any state would do—and what NSA does to the Russians and others right now. Espionage, human or electronic, is a normal aspect of the SpyWar that’s technically illegal but everybody participates in.

What the Russians are now engaged in, though, is something different and more serious. The Kremlin is weaponizing stolen information for political effect. This is something like what American spies term covert action, which includes the use of propaganda for political advantage over foreign adversaries.

Our press and politicians increasingly dance to a tune being called in Moscow.

However, what the Kremlin is doing here is far more aggressive since it’s aimed at directly influencing American politics in an election year. This falls under the rubric of what Russian spies call Active Measures, and they’ve been doing this a long time. This was a Moscow staple during the Cold War, when the KGB used Western fronts to disseminate disinformation—a mix of truth and fiction aimed at distorting political debate.

The Russians are still playing this game. Wikileaks, nowadays a transparent Kremlin front, disseminated some 20,000 purloined DNC emails that were stolen by Russian intelligence. Now we have another hacking group that’s really a Russian spy front pushing stolen information to embarrass the Democrats. They’ve just released the personal phone numbers and email addresses of virtually all the Democrats in the House of Representatives. It’s no wonder Hillary Clinton and her campaign are worried about the Kremlin launching an October Surprise to cripple the Democrats on the eve of our election.

Make no mistake about what Moscow’s up to here. This is a brazen effort to intimidate American elected officials, showing the Kremlin’s secret power over our country’s politics. In the Cold War we called this subversion, meaning trying to undermine our political system, and what Putin’s doing right now is nothing less than a direct, albeit covert, attack on our democracy.

That said, the most insidious impact of the Kremlin’s Active Measures on our democracy is how it creates fake arguments over fake issues—to distract pundits, politicians, and the public from the real issues we face. The current Russian regime excels at this, and under President Putin such KGB tricks have been used to shift domestic politics into the realm of fantasy, where “nothing is true and everything is possible,” in the words of the top analyst of this political trickery. Now Moscow is doing this to America.

This is how our news cycle gets taken over by non-stories based on half-truths (when not outright lies) that portray Russia in a positive light and the West in a negative one. This was somewhat easier to detect in the last Cold War, when Moscow’s mouthpieces were usually left-wingers who spouted easy-to-spot Kremlinisms.

Putinism has mixed up those political categories and today’s Useful Idiots and Fellow Travelers (to use vintage KGB terms with current relevance) can now be found on both the left and the right, in the United States just as in Europe. Hence we have Stephen Cohen, a lefty professor who’s taken the Kremlin line for decades, and who’s married to the editor and part-owner of The Nation, being extolled by certain Republicans for his pro-Putin pontifications. Recently the right-wing agitator Roger Stone, a Trump mouthpiece, praised Cohen’s pro-Russian arguments as a “bitch-slap” in a memorable tweet.

The central role of the Donald Trump presidential campaign must be acknowledged here. As I’ve explained in column after column, the GOP nominee has surrounded himself with advisors who possess troubling ties to Moscow, some of whom are on the Kremlin payroll. It’s therefore no surprise that Trump is now mouthing crude Russian propaganda on the campaign trail, including hisoutrageous smear of President Obama as the “founder” of the Islamic State, which has been a staple of Russian Active Measures for a couple years now.

The increasing Kremlinization of the Trump campaign merits a close look. Its mouthpiece Stone, whoadmits he’s been in touch with Julian Assange, in sync with the Wikileaks founder insists that all the hacking of the Democrats has nothing to do with Moscow—even though, when directly confronted by Bill Maher over his Kremlin links, Assange refused to answer the question and awkwardly redirected.

This is classic disinformation, with a subtle wink taking the place of argument and fact. This KGB technique has insidiously burrowed its way deep into the Trump campaign. Assange recently gave an interview in which he slyly hinted that Seth Rich, a young DNC staffer murdered last month in Washington, may have been a Wikileaks source. The implication is that Rich spilled Clinton’s secrets and was therefore gunned down in cold blood.

This is an ugly slur for which Assange presented no evidence—since there isn’t any, this being no more than an attack on a dead man who can’t respond to the accusation—and soon it was being parroted by the right-wing online echo chamber that fervently backs Trump. This crowd likes to nebulously pin myriad unsolved deaths on Team Clinton in a fact-free fashion, and soon the Trump campaign joined the bandwagon.

Like clockwork, Roger Stone pointed a finger at the Clintons in Seth Rich’s unsolved murder. Stone has blamed the Clinton machine for countless crimes, including homicide, so this was nothing new. Except that this particular Active Measure is coordinated with Kremlin fronts like Wikileaks for political effect—to hurt the Democrats to Moscow’s benefit. Although there’s zero evidence that Seth Rich leaked DNC secrets, much less that his tragic death had anything to do with the Clintons, you can expect this nasty lie to live online for decades to come. Kremlin disinformation operations, like diamonds, are sometimes forever.

There’s an obvious pattern at work here. Take the lie that Obama “founded” ISIS. Much of this stems from reports last year that the White House, through the Pentagon, was secretly backing the Islamic State in Syria. This line, peddled by fringe websites both left and right, was given a smidge of credibility by shady comments made by Mike Flynn, the Trump campaign’s national security guru, who also happens to be very friendly to the Kremlin. But the essence of the story is provably falseand the Pentagon intelligence report this Big Lie is based on actually says the opposite of what the conspiracy-mongers claim. In this arena, facts have no meaning anymore.

Kremlin lies have become disturbingly routine in our politics. This goes beyond Trump. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee, has made statements every bit as pro-Putin as anything emanating from Team Trump. In an interview with RT, the Kremlin propaganda network, Johnson defended the Kremlin’s theft of Crimea in early 2014, stating that it was an internal Russian matter since Ukraine was really “like Puerto Rico” is to America, in other words a territory, not a sovereign country.

Things are no better on the left, and Green Party nominee Jill Stein is strangely friendly to the Kremlin too, calling for close partnership with Moscow during an appearance on—you guessed it—RT. Stein attended that network’s anniversary gala in Moscow last year, sitting at the same table of honor with President Putin as—you guessed it—Mike Flynn. Stein’s pro-Putin utterances are finally getting media attention, and she’s not helped her case by featuring Julian Assange, whom she’s hailed as a “hero,” as a keynote speaker at the Green Party’s recent convention.

Then there’s the matter of Hillary Clinton. None can fairly accuse her of sympathy for the Kremlin—I’m sure she’s seething with rage at Putin right now over his efforts to steal the election for Trump—but her inner circle, too, possesses questionable financial ties to Moscow, while some of her dealings with Russian firms have rightly raised suspicions among security experts.

To say nothing of her awful security lapses in EmailGate, which have rendered the country and her campaign vulnerable to espionage and blackmail. There’s every reason to believe that the Kremlin has her emails from her time as secretary of state, even the 30,000 deleted ones, while NSA experts I know think many of the subsequent hacks of the DNC can be traced back to Hillary’s slipshod computer security during Obama’s first term. Putin now possesses a vast trove of compromising materials, what the Russians term kompromat, on Hillary and her party thanks to her inattention to basic security.

We are therefore in the strange situation that the only major presidential contender in this election cycle lacking troubling ties to the Kremlin is the socialist Senator Bernie Sanders—who actually honeymooned in the Soviet Union back in 1988.

The gross intelligence failures of the Obama years combined with the Trump campaign’s bizarre bromance with Putin have birthed a genuine security crisis for the United States. We need to squarely face how bad things really are. This week a senior Intelligence Community official in Washington told me, with the GOP nominee acting as the Kremlin’s unwitting agent, we’re up against “the biggest counterintelligence threat faced by this country since the early Cold War.”

In other words, we’re back to the late 1940s, when our government was swarming with Kremlin moles in most of our cabinet departments and security agencies. They were giving Moscow everything they could get their hands on, from political gossip to top secret war plans, even how to make an atomic bomb. Communist agents and fronts were pervasive in our political life too.

VENONA was so valuable, our ace in the espionage hole, that hardly any American officials knew about it. The press and pundits knew nothing of it until after the Cold War’s end. Even President Harry Truman was briefed on VENONA only near the end of his tenure in the White House. This need to protect NSA’s great secret regrettably led to decades of wild rumors about the true extent of Soviet espionage back in the 1940s.

We need another VENONA to defeat the Kremlin’s current spy offensive—but do we have one? Regrettably there’s no reason to think we do. Our slipshod government cannot keep the most basic secrets these days, so it’s doubtful they could protect something so valuable as VENONA again.

To say nothing of the defection to Moscow three years ago of Edward Snowden, who took vast troves of highly classified materials with him. Since the Kremlin now admits Snowden’s their agent, it’s safe to assume he’s told the Russians everything about NSA he ever knew.

The bottom line is that Vladimir Putin has managed to penetrate our government and subvert our democracy in a fashion we haven’t seen in decades. Our press and politicians increasingly dance to a tune being called in Moscow. No matter who wins our election on November 8, the Kremlin looks set to be the real winner.

Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the publisher of Observer Media.

John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.

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